Teaching what?

Among the letters (October 6) to the NYT Science Times spurred by Jane Brody’s “From Birth, Engage Your Child With Talk” (September 29), in which she wrote that speaking and reading to young children will help develop their communication skills, is this odd item from Susan Poser of Lincoln, Nebraska:

I could not agree more with Ms. Brody’s exhortation to talk and read to young children all the time. It reminded me of the game that my husband, a chemistry professor, and I would play with our daughter when she was 2.

We would each hold one of her hands, and on every step we would lift her up and say one of the elements of the periodic table. By the time she was 4, she could recite the first 45 elements of the periodic table (up to Rhodium), on demand.

It seems that with persistence and ingenuity, you can teach a young child almost anything. But I don’t see how reciting the periodic table could contribute to developing communication skills (whatever you think “communication skills” are).

Painting food

One of the incidental pleasures (for a linguist) of spending time with small children is being reminded (or actually discovering) things about the language(s) you share with them.

Case in point: at breakfast with my daughter (Elizabeth) and her daughter (Opal) a little while ago, we got into a discussion of paintings. One of us observed that lots of paintings were of people, and Elizabeth volunteered that such paintings were called portraits. (Middle-class parents are given to commenting explicitly to their children on vocabulary.) I concurred, and Opal was happy with that.

Getting into the spirit of the thing, I went on to say that many people painted food, in particular fruits and vegetables.

Opal made her EWW face, at which point Elizabeth and I realized she was thinking we were saying that some people applied paint to fruits and vegetables — which would, of course, in most cases make them entirely inedible. The sense of the verb paint she got was that of painting buildings, walls, faces (facepainting children is a popular event at community festivals), and the like.

Obviously, she had more than one sense of the verb, since she used paint as ‘make a painting of’ in other contexts. The trick is in selecting the appropriate sense in this particular context, and that requires knowing not just the meanings of the verbs but also knowing a good bit about cultural practices (for instance, that artists generally do not apply paint to foodstuffs).

Oh yes, Elizabeth and I took the occasion to introduce the expression still life.

Biggering and ensmalling

From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s blog, about her daughter (age 5):

… we were discussing mangos. Opal said they grew on bushes, I said they grew on trees. I cited Mangaboom as a source; she pointed out that it was a story. So I went to the Internet! On my phone. She was OK with the pictures of mango trees, but what she was fascinated by was the process of making the picture bigger. “Hey, can I bigger it?” she said. I explained that “bigger” made sense, but we say “enlarge”. She said, quite patiently really, “Can I enlarge it? And then ensmall it?” Boy, was I sorry to explain that the opposite of “enlarge” is, of all things, “reduce”.

It’s not just little kids. You can find some hits for bigger ‘enlarge’, mostly (but not entirely) in computer contexts. For instance:

How did you do that neat texturing? It really DOES look like an adobe wall, I clicked on the pic to bigger it and it looks very cool! (link)

And yes again, 3D glasses will actually work on this (red on your left eye, blue on your right). Oh, and as always, click to bigger it: … (link)

i am 16 and my penis is 13 cm and quite thin.i am quite tall for my age. is my penis going to grow any more? what can i do to bigger it? LENGTH AND WIDTH … (link)

As for ensmall, there are cites where it’s clearly treated as an innovation:

What is more logical than the opposite of ‘enlarge’, namely ‘ensmall’. There are many things in our daily lives that we might want to make smaller – cars, … (link)

in our families find ways to ‘ensmall’ rather than enlarge our spending, and make our presence rather than presents a sign of our interest and love? (link)

But there are other occurrences. OED2 has an entry for ensmall, though it’s marked as rare, and the dictionary has only one cite:

1857 THOMSON Land & Book IV. xl. 612 To reconcile my previous anticipations with the vastly ensmalled reality.

And it still crops up, again mostly in computer contexts:

For them and for anyone else who needs to ensmall a detailed image, here’s my amateur recipe for generating good thumbnails via PhotoShop: … (link)

This is a Craigslist ad that seems to be real. I’m going to ensmall it at the bottom in case the URL doesn’t persist. (link)

Bigger ‘make bigger, enlarge’ is a (causativizing) verbing of an adjective, a comparative adjective at that. Verbing of adjectives in English is usually affixal (as in en-large, damp-en, modern-ize); zero derivation is rare. But kids are fond of zero derivation (of all sorts), and for good reason:  it allows them to expand their vocabulary at essentially no cost.

Ensmall is a more sophisticated innovation, verbing the adjective small via the prefix en- (a pattern that is not productive in English). But it’s a natural innovation, created on analogy with enlarge (and exploiting the opposition of large and small), which is transparently what Opal, having just been offered the model enlarge by her mother, did.

There are several other possible verbings of small: zero-derived small, suffixed smallen, doubly affixed ensmallen, suffixed smallize. All of these are non-standard, but all are attested — a tribute to people’s fondness for regularity.

The first word

From Dale Coverly’s Speed Bump:

My daughter’s first word was “no”, quickly followed by “dog” and “cat”. “Hippopotamus” would have been too much to expect.

[Update 16 April: my granddaughter's first words were (in order) "hi", "no", and "uh-oh". "Hi" was used to greet someone -- and request that the addressee pick her up.]